The Author in praise of his precedent Poem.
Now, Rufus, by old Glebron’s fearful mace,
Hath not my muse deserved a worthy place?
Come, come, Luxurio, crown my head with bays,
Which, like a Paphian, wantonly displays
The Salaminian[340] titillations,
Which tickle up our lewd Priapians.
Is not my pen complete? Are not my lines
Right in the swaggering humour of these times?
O sing pæana to my learnèd muse:
Io bis dicite! Wilt thou refuse? 10
Do not I put my mistress in before,
And piteously her gracious aid implore?
Do not I flatter, call her wondrous fair,
Virtuous, divine, most debonair?
Hath not my goddess, in the vaunt-guard[341] place,
The leading of my lines their plumes to grace?
And then ensues my stanzas, like odd bands
Of voluntaries[342] and mercenarians,
Which, like soldados[343] of our warlike age,
March rich bedight in warlike equipage, 20
Glittering in dawbèd laced accoustrements,[344]
And pleasing suits of love’s habiliments;
Yet puffy as Dutch hose they are within,
Faint and white-liver’d, as our gallants bin;
Patch’d like a beggar’s cloak, and run as sweet
As doth a tumbril[345] in the pavèd street.
And in the end (the end of love, I wot),
Pygmalion hath a jolly boy begot.
So Labeo did complain his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none; 30
Yet Lynceus knows that in the end of this
He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.
Ends not my poem then surpassing ill?
Come, come, Augustus, crown my laureate quill.
Now, by the whips of epigrammatists,
I’ll not be lasht for my dissembling shifts;
And therefore I use Popelings’[346] discipline,
Lay ope my faults to Mastigophoros’ eyne;
Censure my self, ’fore others me deride
And scoff at me, as if I had denied 40
Or thought my poem good, when that I see
My lines are froth, my stanzas sapless be.
Thus having rail’d against myself a while,
I’ll snarl at those which do the world beguile
With maskèd shows. Ye changing Proteans, list,
And tremble at a barking satirist.
[333] Shape.
[334] Pillowcase.—An old word used by Chaucer in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
[335] Idle, silly.
[336] Quy. “swerved” (an imperfect rhyme to “erred”)?
[337] See note, vol. i. p. 9.
[338] Old eds. “Gods.”
[339] “Sadly”—in sober truth.